Monthly Archive: December 2015

Facebook is the third of what is probably a quartet (or quintet) of the destruction of the innocence of computing. First was viruses, second was malware, third is facebook. I suspect fourth will be related to control of networking itself, and fifth will be licensing of high level computer ability. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Jason Scott: FaceFacts (View on gamamb.tumblr.com)

Justice Department officials said Wednesday they have not asked the Tor Project to modify its technology to make identifying online criminals easier. “We are working to use legal means available to us and the technology available to us” to identify criminals who use the Tor anonymity network to hide, said one. Officials spoke with reporters ahead of today’s sentencing of Kirk Cottom in a federal court in Omaha, Neb., for receiving and accessing child pornography via websites hidden in the Tor network. Cotton is among 19 men convicted in connection with illicit websites run by an Omaha-based administrator, who was...

They know that the smart, major terrorist groups will never use systems with government-mandated backdoors for their important communications, they’ll continue to use strong systems developed in and/or distributed by countries without such government mandates, or their own strong self-designed apps. So it seems clear that the real reason for the government push for encryption backdoors is an attempt not to catch the most dangerous terrorists that they’re constantly talking about, but rather a selection of “low-hanging fruit” of various sorts. Inept would-be low-level terrorists. Drug dealers. Prostitution rings. Free speech advocates and other political dissidents. You know the types....

Anyone who really wants to encrypt their communication is going to find a method for doing so, whether it’s bundled with mass-market products or not. When you make encryption harder to get for ordinary people, you don’t deny it to terrorists. You just make the population as a whole insecure in their daily communications. Interview with Phillip Rogaway by The Atlantic (The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists) (View on gamamb.tumblr.com)